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Topic: Today Valençay day ! (Read 4766 times)

Finally found the time and opportunity to start with Valençay.Got 10 ltr of fresh raw goat milk, last night the milk tank was emptied, so it was a fresh amount. At the moment he is milking about 450 goats (at the most this is about 600) and the fat is at this moment around 4.1%. The goats are Dutch Milking Goat x Nubian.Back to the making:At 24C I added 1/8 tsp of Alpha culture (Yoav, do you already sell that?) which is 2/3 Lactococcus Cremoris and Lactococcus Lactis and 1/3 Lactococcus Diacetilactis and Leuconostoc Cremoris, 1/8 tsp PC Neige and 1/8 tsp Geo 55 from the same supplier as the culture. Half an hour later I added just over 1/4 liquid calf rennet.This will rest for 24 hours and then I will pre-drain for 6 hours. To be continued....

Hi Herman!! How nice to see that you've posted about making Valencay because I started a make of that last night!! What is it they say? great minds think alike?? .

Are you using a particular recipe? I am loosely using Peter Dixon's recipe....I am doing some things differently and his recipe is for a whole class of French lactic type goat and cow cheeses so not specific in much detail. I don't have a pH meter so I am winging it. he gives different amount of cultures depending upon how long you want the ripening phase to last. I chose the shortest ripening phase of 15-20 hours and now I am up before the sun (starting coughing....lung issue from some moldy clover hay in the barn) and drinking tea in the warm kitchen. I have put wood on the stove fire and all is quiet except for our refrigerator that sounds like it is powered by chipmunks. The cats have been fed and are looking out the windows at the snow falling outside.

Will you use pyramid molds? I have 3 from Yoav and I'm using a lot of other molds too. I have 2 1/2 gallons of milk and it's high in solids so I expect a lot of cheese from it. My plan is to put some leaves on them just after ashing them, while they are still wet, so that the leaves stick. I use leaves that have been frozen and thawed so that they are more flexible.

I used MM100, Geo 13, PC SAM(which is an anti Mucor type that a home cheese making cheese place carried and I am trying to use it up before I use my better PC), and I added a little bit of MD88 which I hope might add a buttery flavor by it's action. It is not an acidifying culture itself, it is diacetylactis which is in the culture you used.

I don't know if I will pre-drain my batch. I may split the batch and pre-drain some and not the other. I would like to pre-drain the curd I will put in the pyramid molds because that will make a difference....especially since I can't wait around to keep adding curds the way my recipe says. (and how does that work anyway....isn't the curd continuing to acidify as you wait for room to ladle it into the molds?). The other molds I have won't matter if I fill once. I have to go milk goats and then clean stalls so I won't be able to do anything for my make for hours once I leave the house this morning.

I sure hope you are going to post photos as you unmold and age your cheese! I'll enjoy comparing our makes.Have you pre drained before? And how was it putting pre drained curd into molds? I've wondered whether it will be like smooshing cream cheese into a mold....and whether it will form a cohesive shape after that.

well, I read the recipe in "200 easy...", read Peter Dixon's recipe, read your thread about Valençay and Yoav's comments and distilled a recipe out of that all. We'll see how it works out. The milk is good so I'm pretty sure I will end up with cheeses that can be consumed .Cause it's the first time I make this, I didn't buy pyramids but extra small baskets which have about the same content (110 x 80 x 65 mm). I needed those anyway, because I want to make more smaller lactic cheeses in future.So it's snowing already? We had some nights here with temps below 0C, but during the days it's all rain. Which is lucky for me: A lot of snow will mean a lot of problems with the trains and I'm travelling to Amsterdam every day by train.How many goats do you have to milk? I like the atmosphere in a stall in the morning, I pick up my cow milk during milking time and I love to be there. Reminds me of holidays on the farm of my uncle when I was a kid...The only predrained cheeses I made were Feta and white Stilton with blueberries, but I think I will check the draining tomorrow several times and then suddenly decide "Okay, now is the time to go for it and mould them", more based on guts feelings than facts or measurements (PH-meter is not working at the moment). With the feta that works okay.Surely I'll make pictures when I unmould them and after ashing/salting them, also because I know Boofer loves cheese-porn .

HI Herman, You use recipes like I do!!! I look several over and then see what makes sense given my situation. I also heavily weight the recipes that I know are from extra reputable sources. I have some very tiny molds from Yoav because I want to wrap small cheeses in leaves so I should get some of those out to play with.....thanks for reminding me of them by mentioning your small baskets. I have used small ricotta baskets before for Valencay and they were fine.

I am only milking 5 goats right now and usually it is very peaceful in the barn and a favorite time but right now is rutting season and 3 goats were in heat and bellowing so much I am afraid the whole herd will be deaf by the end of December! At least they are quiet when in the milking room. When I was a teenager I had a Jersey cow and milking her was a favorite thing. I was a singer in a band that did old traditional United Kingdom and American songs and so I sang always as I milked. It was a peaceful time. I remember back then we had colder winters and two weeks each winter would be -34F (-36C) at night with not above 0F (-17C) during the day. The first squirts of milk to hit the milk pail would freeze.

I do love being in the barn and there is an office (I can't legally call it a living place) in my barn that I stay in when the goats and sheep are birthing. I love living up there. I can walk down as often as I want at night to check on the mothers, I can hear them while I am sleeping and in the morning, after milking I have very fresh milk for my tea and granola. I can sit on the daybed to eat and watch the flocks/herds below me out to pasture. It's very nice. I have a blog that I write on sometimes. Here is a post with photos of the place in the hayloft. The other blog entries show the rest of the barn, the livestock, the gardens here, etc. Oh, and they show yummy food from our gardens too. We currently have...... goats: 2 bucks, 5 does, 4 young does and 3 more ready for butcher. sheep: 2 rams, 3 ram lambs, 8 ewes....1 ram and 3 ram lambs will be butchered also for our meat and to sell some. We also have the dogs that live with the goats to guard them, chickens and meat rabbits. (the chickens and rabbits live at the small barn closer to the house) The big barn is up the hill through the woods.

thanks for sharing your blog with me. I spend most of my Saturday night reading it. I love the way you describe the live at the farm.

Cheers,Herman

Oh, I'm so glad you enjoyed it! The visit offer still stands if you come to Massachusetts......we do have a guest room! (and lots of cheese now!!!) And the baby goats are so small we could put one in your suitcase to take back to Holland!

Yesterday I predrained the curd for about six hours. That is, part of the curd. While I tried to knot the four corners of the cheesecloth together, I let one point slip away and lost about half of my curd. .Anyway, I have four Valençay type cheeses. Tonight, after draining them moulded for 24 hours, I salted them with a 5:1 mix of salt and charcoal.I mixed it by volume, 1 Tbsp salt and 1/2 tsp charcoal.

Looking VERY nice!!! Mine are not ashed/salted as evenly as yours. Did you see my thread of it. I did some small cute ones. http://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,10514.0.html And I played with leaves on some of them. A total of 21 cheeses for me and of all sizes so it'll be interesting to see the ripening difference between sizes.

That's a nice video, pity I don't speak Spanish (or Catalan?), but not the way I done it:I mixed the salt and charcoal in a glass bowl (try to avoid the use of plastics, because that's hard to clean) and I used a small funnel to poor it in a small saltshaker. With the saltshaker it was easy to do. I just held the cheeses above a plastic wash basin that was covered with wet paper tissues and shook the shaker And of course I'll keep you all posted...